Tuesday, January 21, 2014

The Oldest House in Washington, DC

To the casual passerby, the large yellow and white Georgian styled
house at 2401 Kalorama Road, NW in the Sheridan-Kalorama neighborhood might be
mistaken for a recreation or a slightly out of place house built in the 1930s
when Colonial-styled architectural revivals were popular. Its origin, however,
dates from its initial construction in Danvers, Massachusetts in the middle of the
18th century, and is as authentic as its painstaking rebuilding in Washington
between 1934 and 1936.

The Lindens was eventually named after the many Linden trees
that originally surrounded it in Massachusetts. It was, however, first known as
“The Great House” when it was built by wealthy merchant and English Loyalist
Robert Hooper (right) whom his neighbors called “King Hooper.” It was built in 1754 as
his summer house in Danvers, just outside Marblehead, where Hooper maintained a
large town house.

By the 1930s, the Lindens was threatened with demolition
after decades of neglect. In fact, its main floor parlor paneling had already
been sold to the Kansas City Museum. After searching for a Colonial era house
to move to Washington for years to house their antique furniture collection,
the Lindens was bought in early 1934 for $10,000 by George M. and Miriam
Hubbard Morris. It was documented with exquisite measured drawings and
photographs in January of that year, carefully labeled, disassembled, and
placed in six freight train cars for its move to Washington.

The Lindens pictured in 1934 at its original location in Danvers, Mass

The Morris’s hired Williamsburg craftsmen and architects to assist
in the project, which took 34 months to complete. George Morris was a local
attorney who eventually became president of the American Bar Association. While
at Dartmouth, he became interested in antiques when he took a course by Homer
E. Keyes, founder of Antiques magazine. His wife Miriam, a 1909 graduate
of the National Cathedral School, was also keenly interested in antiques
following a course of study in Paris (below).

The young couple married in 1918, and with Keyes as their advisor,
began to collect American Queen Anne and Chippendale furniture and accessories.
They eventually purchased a vacant lot in Sheridan-Kalorama on the northwest
corner of 24th Street and Kalorama Road where they indented to build a
recreation of the Byrd family’s 18th century manor, coined Westover, which was located
along the James River. That dream ended with the 1929 stock market crash,
according to Morris.

Instead, they located and purchased the Lindens five years later.
Following a three year rebuilding to exact standards, the Morris’s moved into
2401 Kalorama Road with their three children in 1937. Miriam oversaw what was
then considered an expert restoration, concealing lighting fixtures and phones,
using electrified candles, and even built the radio into a false bookcase in
the library to conceal its location.

The exterior paint was combined with sand to replicate a
stone finish, a building material in short supply in the 1750s. The parlor
walls were recreated from measured drawings from the original at the Kansas
City Museum, but the remainder of the interior paneling and grand staircase was
complete and had been moved intact from Massachusetts.

Miriam’s exhaustive research on every aspect of
architectural and antique furnishings for the house led her to eventually
become one of most regarded experts on the subject in the United States. She
eventually lectured on early Americana in such far away places as Singapore, Thailand,
and Japan. She served as the only woman on the State Department’s Fine Arts
Committee, established in 1961 to study and acquire early American antiques for
the departments Diplomatic reception rooms.

Miriam Morris’s collection of antiques wasn’t her only passion
in life, however. In 1916, at the age of 25, she drew plans for a bright yellow
convertible sports car with crab eye headlights that was made to order by the
Biddle Brothers in Philadelphia. She was also an enthusiastic aviatrix, noted
as the first woman to fly over Guyana’s Kaieteur Falls in a single-engine
plane. She remained at the Lindens with her large and impressive collection of
rare early American antiques until her death in June of 1982. The home’s
contents were auctioned at Christies in New York the following January. The humble
beginnings of the collection, purchased during the Depression brought more than
six figures for many of the numerous furniture pieces.

According to public records, the Lindens recently sold for
$7.165 million in February of 2007 and was featured in Architectural Digest in February of 2014.

2 comments:

Is this really the oldest house in Washington, DC? I believe that The Lindens in Kalorama was built in 1754, but the the original cottage of the Rosedale Farmhouse in Cleveland Park was built in the 1730's.

The portrait of Robert Hooper which you show in your blog is not Robert "King" Hooper, but his middle son, who was also named Robert. A terrific portrait of "King" Hooper from circa 1767 (also by John Singleton Copley) is in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, PA. A miniature portrait of him was a gift to the exceptionally fine collection of the U.S. State Department (given in 1979 or 1980 in honor a former Sec. of State). There may be no portrait of "King" Hooper's principal wife, Ruth, who was the mother of all 11 of their children (though there's more to that story) But a portrait (also from c.1767) of the woman whom he married in 1764, Hannah White-Cowell, was in the collection of the New York Public Library for many years. Though several of the Hoopers' children were grown (including middle son Robert, whose portrait you show -- in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution's Smithsonian Art Museum), and a few were even married by 1764, several others were fairly young -- and the youngest was just short of 2 years old when the senior Hooper re-married. (The youngest, a boy, had been less than a year old when Hooper's wife died.) His new wife (age 37) had already been twice widowed (not uncommon in the Atlantic seaport), and brought to the her own son and three step-children marriage and Hooper household (since their fathers had died, and the 3 step-children were therefore orphans otherwise). The younger Robert Hooper whose portrait you show eventually married the eldest step-child, and adopted her two younger teenage siblings as his wards, to raise them until they came of age. It's a fascinating family story, in an equally fascinating town (which was the 6th largest in N.America when most of the Copley portraits were painted).

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About Me

Paul K. Williams is the President of Historic Congressional Cemetery, and is also the proprietor of Kelsey & Associates, "The House History People," a small firm that specializes in creating a genealogy for a house or building; we research who built it and when, who designed it, who has owned it, and who has lived there and what they did for a living. We focus on the houses in Washington, DC and some other communities across the United States. I've published 19 books with Arcadia, History Press, and Anova Books on neighborhoods in
Washington and my hometown of Skaneateles, NY...titles below. We've
sold more than 45,000 to date! We're publishing Modern SW DC in the fall of 2016, and we are working on a "How to Research Your House History" book.
I've been the author of the popular "Scenes of the Past" column for the
InTowner newspaper beginning in April of 2001.
Visit us at www.WashingtonHistory.com